Often, at used book sales, the temptation of being able to buy almost everything that piques my interest can be dangerous. I pick out books I would never have spent my frugal budget on, were I paying the full price for them. A perfect example is The Book of Cities (by Philip Dodd and Ben Donald), which I found in a dusty closet on the second floor of a house packed with literature. I remember opening it because I remember the sensation I felt as I did—it was like being hit by a sudden wind that brings an equally sudden thunderstorm. 

I pulled a dollar bill from my pocket and bought it right away. 

Some cities we know because we’re of them, others because we’ve visited them. These are either home or a holiday and exist in the realm of our memory rather than our imagination. Then there are cities that we feel we know because we have seen them in films or read about them in fiction; a familiarity that breeds the kind of romance where we save up until we can visit these cities in actuality. These, at least in my experience, would be Paris, Rome, Cairo, Mumbai, Johannesburg. These are the places my mind conjured when I thought of a city: places with celebrated histories; places that had inspired the classic, modern, and postcolonial texts my English major education had taught me to adore. 

I never thought of Almaty or Kashgar or Asmara or Reykjavik or Bukhara. Culture had failed to introduce me to these places, but in a single moment, zipping through the hardback tome in which they were enveloped, I had a desire to visit them, to get to know them—indeed, to think and write about them so that they, too, could enter my imagination and, hopefully, someone else’s. 

Because I was so enamored by the kaleidoscope The Book of Cities allowed the world to become, in idle moments I would pull it from my bookshelf and turn the pages, stopping at Tenerife, Salamanca, Khartoum, Vientiane. It took me a while to believe that all these places exist, and even longer to forgive myself for being so ignorant of them. The leap from page to page; from jute baskets and bright fabric to steel and suspension bridges to sand dunes and sunsets never ceased to dazzle me. In time, I developed a desire to lay the entire book out, to see all these places next to each other in a single moment; something I realized I could do with images, but never physically. 

So, I ripped the book up. 

I tore out every page, snipped the edges to neaten them, and popped four small balls of poster tack on the back. I pushed my bed into a corner and covered the two walls touching it with cities. I laid them in clean lines like brickwork. When I went crooked, I started again from scratch. Somewhere inside me, I wanted my walls to mirror the urban organization of a city planned to perfection, even though my personal favorites were always the ones where order ran askew. It takes me longer to fall asleep now—sometimes I spend hours staring at curtains of flaming pink fabric at a flea market in what could be Casablanca; or rows and rows of houses with whitewashed walls and primary colour rooftops in what seems like Oslo. The book was laid out such that the write-up of each city was on one page, an image of it on the other. But stripped of chronology, geography ran wild. I slumbered surrounded by places that I could not, for the life of me, identify. And I was struck by how superfluous names can be. 

I found myself wishing I could erase every border on the map, and sew the world instead with my eyes. But, if political divisions did not exist, would geography be enough to breed the kind of cultural identities that separate one place from another? I don’t know. It is impossible to picture a planet stirred, as opposed to one defined by ingredients laid out in individual bowls. But, the effort has given me dreams richer and vaster than any I have ever had before. 

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This essay was written for Rent and Ice Cream, a project I collaborated on with designer Oliver Ballon. I wrote, he designed, and back then it felt like we could afford neither our rent nor ice cream.